Waking Up In Time - Acceleration

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration: "Some, such as Vernor Vinge, a mathematician at San Diego State University, see the singularity to be consequence of technological acceleration, with ultra-intelligent computers creating an exponential runaway effect. But I believe technological progress to be but a phase in the overall pattern of development. Millions of years ago it was biological evolution that was accelerating. Ten thousand years ago the development of agriculture was speeding the rate of progress. A century ago it was industrial breakthroughs. Today it is information technology that is pushing the rate of development ever faster. Tomorrow we may be in a new phase of progress. The exploration and development of human consciousness could take over from information technology as an even faster arena of quickening."

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration: "This chemical diversity became the foundation-stone for living systems, and as soon as life became established, the rate of development speeded up. Changes took place not over billions of years, but over millions - and later even faster. Such lengthy time-scales are so far from our everyday experience that it is hard to appreciate just how rapidly evolution has been gaining speed. To get a better feel for these changes, let us chart the evolution of life against a more familiar visual image - New York’s tallest building, the quarter-mile-high World Trade Center. If we make street level the formation of our planet 4.6 billion years ago, then the first living cells appeared about 3.5 billion years ago, on the twenty-fifth floor of the building’s 108 stories. Photosynthesis evolved around the fiftieth floor, and bacteria that breathed oxygen came another ten floors later - more than half way up. More complex cells, capable of sexual reproduction and with a central nucleus, appeared around the seventieth floor. Multicellular organisms came another ten floors above that - and crustaceans ruled the waves on the ninety-fourth floor. Fish appeared on the ninety-seventh floor, and crawled out of the sea on the ninety-ninth. Dinosaurs reigned on floors 104 to 107. And mammals arrived on the top floor. But Homo erectus first di"

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration: "Most cosmologists now believe that the Universe started somewhere between 8 and 15 billion years ago as an unimaginably hot and extremely compact region of pure energy. Intense internal pressures caused this Universe to expand very rapidly - creating the so-called “Big Bang.” As the Universe expanded it cooled and condensed into elementary particles - electrons, positrons, photons, and neutrinos. Cooling further, these particles began forming stable relationships with each other, giving birth to the very simplest of atoms: hydrogen and helium. Matter had been born. It took millions of years, however, for more complex atoms to form. This could only happen when simpler atoms chanced to collide and combine. Over many eons all the elements lighter than iron were created through this fusion process. But at iron the chain stops. The synthesis of heavier elements (e.g. cobalt, nickel, copper, gold, uranium) requires the input of additional energy. This could not happen for several billion years, until the lighter elements had formed stars, and these stars had themselves become “supernova” - the massive thermonuclear furnaces created when stars collapse in upon themselves. From the supernova that preceded our own Sun came most of the heavier elements we now find on planet Earth - and in every cell of our bodies. Matter had evolved, but it had take"

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration: "Looking back over history it is clear that acceleration is not just a twentieth-century phenomenon. Change occurs much faster today than it did a thousand years ago - medieval architecture and agriculture, for instance, varied very little over the period of a century. But even then change occurred much faster than it did in prehistoric times - Stone Age tools remained unchanged for thousands of years."

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration

Waking Up In Time - Acceleration: "The pace of life is speeding up. Hardly the most startling statement. As most of us are only too aware, change comes more and more rapidly. Technological breakthroughs spread through society in years rather than centuries. Calculations that would have taken decades are now made in minutes. Communication that used to take months happens in seconds. Development in every area is happening more and more rapidly. As a result more and more of us are living in the fast lane - many in overdrive. There is more information to absorb, more challenges to meet, more skills to learn, more tasks to accomplish. Yet the time to fit it all in seems to be getting less and less."

World Clock

World Clock: ****"World Clock While the actual numbers cannot be precise the rates of change are what is most interesting. The data are taken from WHO, UN, Internet World Stats, and other official sources."

KurzweilAI.net

KurzweilAI.net: "Kyoto University and University of Wisconsin scientists appear to have independently achieved one of regenerative medicine's holy grails: reprogramming human adult cells to behave like embryonic stem cells, without the use of an embryo or a human egg. The method could provide a way to make patient-specific stem cells, a feat not yet achieved in humans. Such cells could eventually be used for studying complex genetic diseases, or for cell or tissue transplants without fear of immune rejection. The new technique also removes the major ethical objections to embryonic stem-cell research: the creation and destruction of human embryos."

Foreign Policy In Focus | The Story of Religion

Foreign Policy In Focus | The Story of Religion: "Today this faith-based belief moves our country to spend half of the world’s total military expenditures. Our country sacrifices precious blood and treasure for the promise that military power will answer our society’s ultimate concern for safety, security, and prosperity. That superior military power will answer our “prayers” is not a scientific or provable proposition; it is a faith-based belief. No matter how many times the promise has failed, no matter the cost in treasure or in lives, nothing shakes us from that belief. We were even prepared to literally blow up the planet during the so-called Cold War. This shared religious belief in the military as the source of safety, security, and prosperity informs the annual spending choices of Congress."

Foreign Policy In Focus | The Story of Religion

Foreign Policy In Focus | The Story of Religion: "In those pre-historical and early days of history, villages killed a chosen few, and the gods were satisfied. Later, the gods became satisfied with just dumb animals, and most human beings were spared. As a rule, even in wars the fighting tended to be symbolic with the wounding of only a few, maybe a death or two. Exceptions to this rule did, of course, occur with much bloodshed, but, even then, the dead were all or mostly combatants who went to the battlefield. Today, 80-90% of the dead in wars and other violent conflicts are civilian non-combatants. Our militaries, which once ostensibly sought to protect civilians, now target them in the pursuit of “force protection.” Our gods of safety, security, and prosperity will not settle for the sacrifice of a selected few human beings. Offerings now are on a mass scale, thousands, tens of thousands, and even hundreds of thousands -- and sometimes in only a year’s time."

Foreign Policy In Focus | The Story of Religion

Foreign Policy In Focus | The Story of Religion: "We’re fascinated and repelled by stories of the bad old days when pagans sacrificed specially selected human beings (most often very young women) to make the gods happy, so that they’d leave the humans safe, secure, and wealthy. They even lay representations of their wealth – grains, garments, jewelry – on altars as gifts in exchange for the favor of their gods. We thank Progress for delivering us a civilization that has liberated us from such superstitious violence. Human sacrifice has been put well behind us. Then, smugly comfy in our advanced stage of civilization, we lay on our altar $42 of every $100 of our federal taxes to satisfy our gods of war. Why? We do it so that we can be safe, secure, and prosperous."

Foreign Policy In Focus | Dancing in the Earthquake

Foreign Policy In Focus | Dancing in the Earthquake: "There are five religious groups in American society that have, or could have, an impact on U.S. policy toward the Middle East. All five – institutional Jewish, mainstream Protestant, evangelical Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Moslem – have a strong sense of their ultimate roots in the Middle East, and some have what might be called 'ethnic' connections with various communities that live in the Middle East. The five are like extended families with branches that have different yet overlapping memories of the family history. They share some crucial sacred stories and symbols, but they differ in very important ways on the meaning of these stories, texts, symbols, metaphors, and events."

Foreign Policy: The Globalization Index 2007

Foreign Policy: The Globalization Index 2007: "So, why do small countries rank so high? Because, when you’re a flyweight, globalizing is a matter of necessity. Countries such as Singapore and the Netherlands lack natural resources. Countries like Denmark and Ireland can’t rely on their limited domestic markets the way the United States can. To be globally competitive, these countries have no choice but to open up and attract trade and foreign investment—even if they’re famously aloof Switzerland."

The End of Oil is Upon Us. We Must Move On - Quickly. | Autopia from Wired.com

The End of Oil is Upon Us. We Must Move On - Quickly. | Autopia from Wired.com: "The burgeoning economies of China, which will within three years surpass the U.S. to become the world's leading energy user, and India have inalterably changed the global energy landscape, making them the focus of the 675-page report released today. Its projections are staggering. To cite a few: China's energy needs will grow 5.1 percent annually through 2015. Fuel needs will quadruple as its vehicle fleet approaches 270 million in 2030 - at which point China also will need an additional 1,300 gigawatts of electricity, an amount equal to what the United States currently produces. The projections for India are no less daunting. The IEA makes a point of saying the two nations' growth has improved the quality of life for two billion people and therefore 'must be accommodated and supported.' But it also says 'the consequences of unfettered growth in global energy demand are alarming for all countries.'"

The End of Oil is Upon Us. We Must Move On - Quickly. | Autopia from Wired.com

The End of Oil is Upon Us. We Must Move On - Quickly. | Autopia from Wired.com: "The agency states in no uncertain terms in its annual World Energy Outlook that 'alarming' growth in worldwide energy needs will within a generation threaten energy security, accelerate global climate change and possibly bring worldwide shortages and conflicts. It's an unusually pessimistic view from an agency that has long said oil production, with trillions of dollars of investment, could meet rising energy needs. But the explosive growth of China and India has caused a seismic change in thinking at the IEA, which says we must move swiftly, boldly and decisively beyond fossil fuels if we are to avert a crisis."

The End of Oil is Upon Us. We Must Move On - Quickly. | Autopia from Wired.com

The End of Oil is Upon Us. We Must Move On - Quickly. | Autopia from Wired.com: "If there are any lingering doubts as to whether the age of oil is nearing its end, the International Energy Agency has put them to rest and made it clear that only a massive and immediate investment in sustainable energy will prevent a global crisis."

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Second, over the long-term there has been a shifting, and not always stable, equilibrium
between the means of inflicting violence and threatening force and the institutions we
have created to control and regulate the use of force. Certainly in the early modern period
– the seventeenth century – the balance was in favour of the use of force rather than its
control. Yet as state power slowly expanded, a sort of domestic and international peace
was imposed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Arguably, this was upset with the
technological and social developments of the Industrial Revolution and the twentieth
century – when the ability to use organised violence triumphed over the ability of
institutions to control it.

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When we bring indirect conflict deaths into the picture, the full human cost of wars in the
DRC, or Southern Sudan, or Darfur, or Afghanistan or Iraq becomes more obvious, and
then some of the optimism of the ‘declining levels of violence’ proponents appears to be
misplaced. Certainly, we need to entertain seriously the possibility that we believe that
there is a decline in conflict deaths only because we are being more careful and
conservative about what we count as war deaths in recent years. If one uses a more
precise counting method, with conservative counting rules that include only verifiable
battle deaths, then of course one will arrive at lower figures than in the past. Conversely,
if earlier, pre-1990s figures, covering such things as the wars in Angola, Central America
Korea, Mozambique, Southeast Asia and elsewhere were not precise counts, but rough
estimates, based on impressionistic and journalistic accounts, that crucially included or
mixed direct (battle) deaths and ‘indirect deaths’, then perhaps things have not necessarily
changed for the better.

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Terrorism, as most analysts would agree, is a marginal phenomenon from this
perspective. It is difficult to put precise figures on the numbers of victims of terrorist
acts, since definitions matter a great deal here. But at the most, the annual number of
victims of terrorism – according to fairly comprehensive US estimates – is around 14,000
people killed. In 2005, there were 11,100 terrorist incidents, with 14,500 non-combatants
killed (only 86 of whom were Americans according to the US Department of State); 6,000
of whom were police or government officials. In addition, perhaps 25,000 people were
wounded and upwards of 35,000 kidnapped.
Although we do not have good enough data to make meaningful comparisons over time,
one observation we can make is that terrorism represents – depending on how you count
it – somewhere between 20–50 percent of ‘conflict deaths’, and only about five percent of
the total number of victims of armed violence in any given year. Yet in the current
geostrategic context, the threat from terrorism receives vastly disproportionate resources,
and it is no wonder, from the perspective ‘on the ground’, why many individuals think
this attention is skewed, since it does little or nothing to treat the everyday threats and
insecurities that most people face.

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Paradoxically, However, the Instruments of Violence are More Widely Available than at Any
Time in the Past.
As research by the Small Arms Survey has pointed out, there are at least 640 million small
arms and light weapons in the world today, excluding illegal civilian weapons.
Two hundred and forty-one million (38 percent) are in the hands of national armed
forces, 378 million (59 percent) are in legal civilian possession, 18 million (3 percent) are
in the hands of police forces, and 1 million (less than 1 percent) are in the hands of
insurgent groups. If one excludes the special case of weapons of mass destruction, at least
in terms of ‘ordinary lethal force’ the state’s monopoly of violence is a legal, not a
practical, one in most parts of the world. And today, more lethal firepower is available to
more people than at any time. It is also worth noting that this is not a function of the rise
of criminal bands and armed groups – in fact, a very small proportion of the world’s
weapons are in the hands of non-state armed groups, although it is precisely these
weapons that are responsible for much of the death and destruction associated with
contemporary violent conflicts.

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The final piece of the puzzle is that of violence within societies, and here there also
appears to be strong and consistent evidence of a long-term decline in inter-personal
violence in Western and Northern societies. This has been called by Norbert Elias the
‘civilising process’. You may think that you live in violent times or places, but historical
speaking, residents of the global North are extraordinarily secure. The most severe form
of inter-personal violence – homicide – has systematically and dramatically declined in
Western Europe from the high levels of the Middle Ages. Homicide rates dropped
roughly by half from the medieval to the early modern period (late sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries), and by the nineteenth century, had dropped five to ten times
further

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The first, most systemic, explanation is that the process of state-creation is nearly
complete – with a few potential exceptions for separatist or self-determination
movements such as in Aceh, Kosovo, Kurdistan, parts of Northern Somalia, Western
Sahara, etc. I am not saying that all these situations warrant the creation of independent
states, but rather that until their status is resolved, we have potential zones of violent
conflict. And over the past few centuries, post-colonial and imperial conflicts, internal
repression, population transfers, forced assimilation (and resistance to this) have been
part and parcel of the spread and universalisation of the Westphalian state system. We
can be thankful that this process is reaching some sort of conclusion, since state creation
has been a bloody and violent process.

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But what happens when you put this in a longer-term perspective? If the twentieth
century was potentially the most violent in human history, then perhaps recent declines
are simply a return to the norm. Some scholars, such as Meredith Sarkees and J.D. Singer,
have argued that recent declines from the high levels of the twentieth century do not in
fact represent a longer-term trend. When corrected for population growth, and compared
to figures over two centuries, there has been no discernable decline in war deaths since
1816. As they put it: “the correction between deaths per thousand and the passage of
time is insignificant”. Indeed, centuries other than the twentieth have been exceptionally
bloody as well; one merely needs to recall the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth
century, in which between one-quarter and one-third of the population of Central Europe
died from war-related causes – making it, in a sense, the first ‘total war’.

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Most analysts would also agree that, set against the figures for the twentieth century, the
numbers of victims of armed violence today seems rather low. Data from University of
Uppsala (which is used by the Human Security Report, among others) estimates that there
are around 30,000 mainly battle deaths in current wars; others have estimated that the
number of direct deaths is around 80,000–100,000. When one adds to this figure the
200,000–270,000 annual deaths from lethal non-conflict violence (homicide, suicide,
accident, etc.), this gives us a rough total of about 300,000 direct victims of violence per
year

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So any concern with violence – new and old forms – must start by painting a more
complete picture that includes war (both interstate and internal), other forms of violent
conflict short of war, state violence against its citizens, and criminal and individual
violence. From the perspective of the individual victim, all of these sources of insecurity
are equally important, even if not equally likely.

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These examples do not, of course, exhaust the picture, since violence can come in less
dramatic forms, both criminal and other, including homicide, suicide, minor massacres,
local and gang-related violence, and so on. The best estimates, based on research
conducted by the Small Arms Survey, are that there currently occur 200,000–270,000
deaths per year in non-conflict settings, although the figure may actually be somewhat
higher. Even if this figure is an underestimate, this suggests that interstate or traditional
war, at least in the last half of the twentieth century, was not necessarily the biggest risk of
lethal armed violence that people faced, depending on where and when they lived.

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There are considerable uncertainties around historical figures for lethal violence, but let
me just take four examples for the twentieth century to illustrate my point. According to
the historian Eric Hobsbawm, about 187 million people “were killed or allowed to die”
between 1914–1991. Milton Leitenberg, a former associate at the Stockholm International
Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), systematically trawled through the sources, and claims
that about 216 million people died in wars, conflict and “by human decision” in the
twentieth century. Rudolph Rummel, a scholar at the University of Hawaii, comes up
with a figure of about 169 million, and Matthew White (using similar sources) also with
about 170 million violent deaths. However you look at it, this average of about 1.7–2.0
million people killed or allowed to die each year makes the twentieth century the
bloodiest on historical record. This is probably also true in terms of populations as well.

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terrorism is a particular, but not at all new, form of political violence that
represents only a small (although still significant) piece of the total puzzle of lethal
violence today; and
• an account of new forms of violence that is useful to policy-makers and analysts
must highlight the importance of the indirect victims of violence (which I will
explain later) since they are far more numerous that the direct victims – those
people actually killed by bullets, bombs or bayonets.

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historically, war has not been the main source of lethal violence or physical
insecurity; and it is not in the contemporary world either;
• lethal armed violence might be declining (but evidence is not completely
convincing over the long term) – but if so, this is only happening in particular
places and under certain circumstances, and we need to better understand how
and why;
• paradoxically, however, the instruments of violence are probably more widely
available than at any time in the past – with more lethality in the hands of more
people – and this raises a difficult question: are we delicately balanced on a
potentially violent time bomb, or is the problem of political violence going to
slowly solve itself over the long run, regardless of the availability of the
instruments of violence?

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Much has been written about contemporary transformations of war and political violence,
including on civil wars, interstate conflict, communal conflicts, political violence and
terrorism. Most scholars agree that there has been a transformation in contemporary war,
and perhaps even a ‘revolution in military affairs’. Yet there are good reasons to look
more closely at so-called ‘new forms of violence’ to sort out what is and is not new in
contemporary conflicts

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At the same time,
countries that avoid conflict and enjoy some economic growth and democratic progress
are tending (as they have always done in history) to see clear and continuing
improvements in terms of crime rates, tribal and social violence, as well as in reduced
infant mortality and longer life expectancy – although growth can also lead to greater
income differentials that stimulate robbery and other economic crime. We would
probably be more aware of these corrective trends in the overall audit-sheet of violence if
they were not so often obscured by human own-goals like the drug culture and the spread
of HIV/AIDS.

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I would ask a mainly Western audience to remind
itself that even in Europe the idea of restricting responsibility for armed violence to
nation-states and to the formal clashes between them has only become entrenched within
the last three centuries or so.

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This a good time in history to take a new and broader look at the problem of human
violence. Since the time of the Cold War when (at least in the Northern hemisphere) the
agenda was all about massive military violence between states, Western security policy has
been rediscovering the importance of other threats to human life, liberty and happiness. I
say ‘rediscovering’ because this full range of violent behaviour has always existed on the
Earth, only it was concentrated in regions and societies that we had little to do with (or
possibly lost our intimate contact with through the process of decolonisation); or it took
shapes that we tended to compartmentalise and suppress from our security policy
discourse when it happened in our own homes or on our own doorsteps. In any case, the
first decade after the Cold War was coloured by the Western ‘rediscovery’ of non-state
sources and methods of armed conflict, while the second decade has so far been driven
by a new focus on threats posed by much smaller groups of individuals – the so-called
‘asymmetrical’ threats of terrorism potentially linked with the use of mass destruction
technologies.

Eldis - Conflict and security

Eldis - Conflict and security: "The authors argue that security, which had almost disappeared as a key issue from the international political agenda in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, is back on that agenda once again. However, the players in that game are today no longer necessarily the same as during the Cold War, nor are their priorities. The paper also warns that it is unclear which of the factors that appear today as important will prove ephemeral and which will hold."

BeliefWatch: Proof | Newsweek BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller | Newsweek.com

BeliefWatch: Proof | Newsweek BeliefWatch: Lisa Miller | Newsweek.com: "Relations between science and religion have grown so strained that it's hard to imagine they were ever otherwise. Until the Enlightenment, however, science and religion were better than friendly: they were the same thing. The 'scientists' at the great medieval universities were students of theology. Mining divine Scripture for insights into human morality and free will was the most rational thing a person could do, and the greatest thinkers of the Middle Ages (e.g., Thomas Aquinas) spent their lives engaged in such study. Now despite the efforts of a few believing scientists and intellectually rigorous believers, the divorce between the two could not be more acrimonious or complete."